


Pink Monkey Bird

by cjmarlowe



Category: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars - David Bowie (Album)
Genre: Ambiguous Everything, How to save the world, M/M, Other, ambiguous alien, liminal spaces, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28147071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cjmarlowe/pseuds/cjmarlowe
Summary: “You’re him,” I said before I could stop myself, because there was no mistaking that hair, those hands. He met my gaze and the hair on my arms stood up. This was the man who was supposed to save the world. I had so many questions.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Pink Monkey Bird

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angelheadedhipster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelheadedhipster/gifts).



“You’re him,” I said, because there was no mistaking that hair, those eyes, those fingers. I couldn’t _not_ say it, as the door to the diner jingled closed behind me and my glasses started to fog up in the warm air. I stomped the snow off my boots and wiped my glasses with my thumbs and when I could see again he was still there, back to the window and platform boots up on the vinyl bench with long legs stretched out and crossed at the ankle. He lifted his coffee cup to slick, iridescent lips, and quirked both an eyebrow and the corner of his mouth.

I never imagined I’d see him here, alone in a Brooklyn diner after midnight, When he met my eyes, the hair on my arms stood up. This was the man who was supposed to save the world. 

I had so many questions.

“I’m certainly someone,” he said, and I couldn’t look away as I slid into the booth opposite him. 

Maybe magnetic was not just a metaphor with Ziggy Stardust, man from another world. Maybe I really did have no choice in that moment but to sit down opposite him, right where the streetlight came in through the window and illuminated a half-moon on the table. A diner in the early hours was a kind of liminal space, after all. I guess anything could happen.

“You’re—? I mean, who—? Where—? I— I don’t even know what I mean.”

“But I do,” he said, and put his coffee down on the table with an audible tap of ceramic on Formica. “And you are…?”

Oh, God. I just sat down with Ziggy Stardust with only an implied invitation—no, not even that. With only a vague look that wasn’t completely dismissive. Of course he didn’t know who the fuck I was or what I was doing there. Even if it seemed like he was reading my mind.

“James,” I said. Not Jim or Jimmy or Jimbo or anything that the guys at work called me. Not here, not now.

“James,” he echoed me. “James, you want to learn the mysteries. Who am I? What am I? Where do I come from? But you haven’t asked the question you really want to ask yet. So you’re here now. Go on, then. Ask me.”

“No, I’ve—” I began, but he was right. I hadn’t asked what I really wanted to know. “How?” I said, and he almost smiled. “How are you going to do it? How do you fix this? How can you save us?”

Five years. Less, now, if it’s to be believed. How do you even fix that? 

“There it is,” he said. “Let me ask you a question, James. What do you do?”

“Me?” I said. I was starting to feel very warm, and peeled my scarf and coat off. “It doesn’t matter what I do. You—”

“Of course it does,” he interrupted me, then reached up and ran a finger over his lower lip, spreading his lipstick afresh. It was hard to concentrate on the question, watching that. It was hard to remember my own name.

“I’m a laboratory technician,” I said and hoped I didn’t have to elaborate. He looked otherworldly, but he wasn’t _really_ from another world. I was pretty sure. Almost certain.

“How could you possibly think that doesn’t matter?” he said, but it didn’t. That wasn’t to say I didn’t like my job, or didn’t think it was important, but it wasn’t going to save the world. Not in the next few years, anyway. “When you go in to work on Monday, what are you going to do?”

I didn’t have to think about the answer, which was a relief. “Sterilize the equipment. Prep slides. Suck up to my boss.”

“Hmm,” he said, and licked his lips and reached out to me. To me. With thin arms in skintight silver. The hand touched mine and was it a little too white? Were those fingers a little too long? But it was warm and alive and when he curled his fingers around my forearm I felt my own pulse beneath his hand.

“How?” I said again. “With music? Will music really change the world?”

“Of course it will,” he said, “but not just mine. Music has always changed the world.”

Maybe you don’t fix this. Maybe you just make it bearable.

His gaze met mine again and it was impossible to look away. He held my hand between his thumb and fingers, as if testing the texture of it, the solidity of it, then brought it to his lips. He gave me plenty of time to pull away, but why would I ever want to do that? Why would anyone? I was probably supposed to do something, reciprocate, but I hardly even knew where to start, which made me feel an awful lot like a schoolboy and not like a professional with bona fide suits in his closet who only let loose anymore on Saturday nights.

We were in public, more or less, but the nearest other diner was fifteen feet away and he wouldn’t have known Ziggy Stardust if he’d sat in his lap and sang in his face. He didn’t have eyes for anything other than his hot turkey sandwich and his glass of Coca-Cola.

“Will we survive?” I said, swallowing the last word and almost my tongue.

“That depends,” he said. “Will you survive this?”

He slipped my finger into his mouth, warm and wet and impossibly soft, and one could only imagine what it would feel like if it weren’t a finger. After all, I was only human. Him, I wasn’t sure of.

He looked past me and up, winked, and my finger left his mouth in a slow, luxurious slide. I looked over my shoulder at nothing, then back at Ziggy Stardust whose name I couldn’t imagine shortening to just Ziggy even with his mouth on my body. It felt surreal to think about that and so I didn’t.

“What—?” I said. “Was someone watching.”

“Does it matter?” he said, and it did and it didn’t. But it didn’t matter enough to pull away.

“They’re always watching me from somewhere, darling,” he said with a broad sweep of his hand as though they were all around us at that very moment. Maybe he meant cameras. Maybe this man could see things I couldn’t see. Maybe this man was no man. Maybe man didn’t even mean anything to someone from the stars. “Someone’s eye is always on me.”

That much, I was sure, was true. Right now, it was mine, and I didn’t mind that there were so many others both before and after.

“It’s because you shine so bright,” I said, immediately embarrassed at such a trite statement, no matter how true. “Like a meteor—” But those only shone brightest when they were falling back to earth.

“Baby, this meteor’s never coming back down.”

I stilled, but surely he hadn’t read my mind, just followed the line of thought to its logical conclusion. Meteors always did, though - that’s why they were meteors - so it probably wasn’t the right way to put it. But the biggest and the brightest landed with a bang heard round the world, so maybe the metaphor worked anyway. It was impossible to imagine the light in front of me fading away. If it ever went out, it wouldn’t be quietly.

My hand was in both of his now, each holding one side of it close as though I were a precious object.

Part of me didn’t want to be held delicately, though. Part of me didn’t want reverence, it wanted to follow through on that promise of physicality. It wanted not just hands and lips and eyes, it wanted to know what was beneath that swath of silver covering the rest of him, it wanted to peel away the platform boots and wipe off the makeup and discover all of the rest of him. 

And I wanted the rest of him to know me, too, even as I knew he had discovered others before me. What other secrets would he, could he, share with me? His hands radiated heat and the rest of him radiated something else. He made me feel…something. Something I didn’t even know how to put words to but it make me sit a little taller, made me think a little bit more clearly. It made me want to live to see everything that was to come.

“How?” I asked him again. How did he fix this? And he squeezed my hands, then put his feet on the floor and let go of me. He was leaving, and I could no more have stopped him than commanded his presence in the first place.

He paused with one hand still on the table, though, his body already half turned towards the door. “When you go in to work on Monday, what are you going to do?”

“I’m… I’m going to rediscover things,” I said, and I no more had to think about this answer than the last one. “I’m going to look at the world from the atoms on up. I’m going to _breathe_ and _see_ and live.”

“Yes, you are,” he said, throwing some bills on the table, much more than the cost of a cup of coffee. A part of me had almost expected him to toss stardust, a spray of glittery magic across the table and me.

He was really leaving, and I watched him leave, his pants as tight as his sleeves, every part of him visible through them. He looked like any other man, and like none of them at all. And maybe I would always wonder what was beneath it all or maybe I could come in here next week or next month and he would be back at this table and I would get to find out. For the first time in months I was thinking about the future again.

It was only once he was gone I realized he’d finally answered my question after all.


End file.
